Over the course of a year with the help of our amazing teacher, Frankie Adams, we have learned the basics and beyond of being a digital media specialist! We started our journey with learning about the adobe products and how to use them for graphic design to start but then much more as time went on. Most of us had little idea how to do any of this stuff but as the program went on, we grew to love not only what we were learning but our classmates and teacher along the way. After learning the basics of graphic design, we went right into web design learning how to code a website using HTML and CSS. This was one of the toughest units for a lot of us as learning to code was a different and sometimes difficult mindset. As time went on, everyone grew and learned and exceled at this! People who struggled to grasp the basics were now making fully functional and amazing websites! We were doing it all the hard way too. Little did we know later in the year we would find what would take us hours to code could be made in minutes. As the semester wrapped up quickly a new semester had started. This time what we would be learning wouldn’t be something on the computers. We started our photography journey. Like coding, a lot of us struggled with photography. At first glance it seems like a pretty easy thing to do but as we got into it we quickly found out to take a good photo its not just point and click, there’s a lot more thinking to it. We learned the ins and outs of taking professional photos. We would take everything from product and portrait shots to street and light painting. Video and audio editing were next with making a news broadcast and recording our own podcasts. Diving back into the adobe we had learned to professionally edit photos, videos, and audio clips we had a pretty good skill set under our belts. Finally we are rounding out the year with some advanced web design. We got shown that to make a website you don’t need to hard code everything. There’s some nifty websites out there that will do most of the work for you! As we dive further into WordPress and using our other skills, we have learned throughout the year everyone is making such amazing projects and websites. We all started out strangers and now we joke around like friends and jump up to help whenever someone needs help with something. The year went by in a flash, but we learned so many skills and made friends along the way. Like a firework we all started at the same place learning the same things but in the end, we will explode, and each go our own ways with the skills we have learned. Frankie was one of the best teachers I personally have ever had, and she set the bar real high for not only teachers but mentors in the future.